JULIAN ROSEFELDT
Meine Heimat ist ein düsteres, wolkenverhangenes Land
My home is a dark and cloud-hung land
Solo exhibition at ARNDT Berlin
July 16 – August 20, 2014
Opening reception | July 15, 2014 | 6-9 pm
PRESS RELEASE
ARNDT Berlin is delighted to present Julian Rosefeldt’s exhibition ‘My Home is a Dark and Cloud-Hung Land’ to mark the ten-year anniversary of the gallery’s partnership with the artist.
Since beginning his artistic career twenty years ago, Julian Rosefeldt, who has lived in Berlin since the late 1990s, has continually dealt with German history and approached questions of national identity and myths in photographs as well as film and video installations.
Europe is currently experiencing a resurgence of nationalist sentiments in an economic and social context that even shows disturbing parallels to the period between the two world wars. Economic stability within the European Union is out of balance, interest rates are at record lows, and those who benefit least from the advantages of the EU worry about their savings and what some see as excessive immigration. The imagined enemies in the minds of Euroskeptics and right-wing populists, which have recently helped Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Nigel Farage achieve previously unimagined victories, are those who bear the brunt of globalization: refugees from countries in the former Third World. And even Germany, which so far seems to be least affected by the global economic crisis, has suddenly reemerged as a perceived enemy for a growing number of European citizens for the first time since the end of the Nazi era.
In the context of the current relevance of these issues, ARNDT Berlin will be showing a selection of photographic and film works, including the film installation ‘My Home is a Dark and Cloud-Hung Land, 2011’, which was co-produced by the Jewish Museum Berlin and is also the source of the exhibition’s title. This work was exhibited in early 2014 at the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg and was part of Rosefeldt’s major retrospective in 2012 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
The current presentation will also feature the series of photographs ‘Hidden City, 1994/2010’, which will be on view this November at the Tate Modern in London. The series is a new collection of photographs that Rosefeldt originally took in 1994 and 1995 in the buildings of the former Nazi Party headquarters on the Königsplatz in Munich and in the surrounding area. On view will be also be the series ‘Detonation Deutschland, 1996’ (in collaboration with Piero Steinle), which shows demolitions of buildings in Germany from 1945 until the work’s creation in the mid-1990s. ‘Archive of Archives, 1995’ is a series of photographs, for which Rosefeldt visited and documented places of collecting in his native city of Munich.
Julian Rosefeldt (born 1965 in Munich), studied architecture in Munich and Barcelona (MA 1994). In 2009/2010 Rosefeldt was visiting professor at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar and since 2011 professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. Since 2010 Rosefeldt is a member of the Bayrischen Akademie der Schönen Künste in Munich (department for film and media art). Rosefeldt lives and works in Berlin since 1999.
PRESS
Berliner Morgenpost | August 2014 | Ist unsere Heimat ein duesteres wolkenverhangenes Land
TAZ | July 2014 | Was kann der Wald denn nur dafür, dass er so schön ist
Die Welt Kompakt | July 2014 | Ist das nicht romantisch
ArtBerlin | July 2014 | Ist unsere Heimat ein duesteres wolkenverhangenes Land
FAZ | July 2014 | Ah diese Galerieluft